Feedback

"There's a right time to ask for feedback"

Relying on your own intuition and knowledge can be a good starting point, but sometimes it’s not enough to stew in your own juices and outside input is required to move past a roadblock.

Of course, bringing in other people to brainstorm is common practice in work environments (often overused, think of all those pointless meetings you’ve been to), it’s also not the best use of getting feedback. If open-ended questions are rarely the best approach to moving forward, then what is?

First of all, you have to make sure you have explored every single avenue that could lead to progress within your own reach. When we focus on a project, we may get locked in too much into a single idea, a specific approach or the use of particular tool to get it done. This often gets to a point of tunnel vision where we stop being aware of other options because we have chosen one particular path.

When we come across a roadblock, it’s important to zoom out and assess if other paths have branched off our original trajectory and excluded certain solutions that now have become useful. Zooming out widens the image and allows us to take a couple of steps backwards and choose a more productive route towards the goal.

Maybe we overlooked a more promising tool or practice, or something that seemed unproductive three steps earlier now turns out to be a winner?

As a second step, consider the choices that you have made along the way and find out if the reasons you made certain choices need to be re-evaluated based on knowledge you have accumulated in later steps. This realisation in itself could help you move beyond the problem you encountered in the first place.

Stepping back even further, you might want to think about outside-the-box assistance from your areas of expertise further afield. Have you come across similar issues in earlier situations and what have you done back then? Could you apply other, not immediately related, skills to solve your problem? Do you need a radically different approach?

I know, all these options take time, but rather than repeatedly running into the same wall, taking time out is often the better solution.

All this said, of course you are not supposed to toil in solitude all the time, but you also don’t want to waste other people’s time, as you would expect them not to waste yours, right?

It’s only at this point that it makes sense to ask for outside feedback. After all the previous review and consideration, you are now ready to ask for specific input with clear questions that highlight a particular issue rather than a generic “I’m stuck, can you help?”

Ultimately, feedback only works if you ask the right questions, and those questions present themselves most easily when you have explored options on your own first. This also helps to crop lines of inquiry that you have looked into yourself before, and fine-tune any new avenues that may result from other people’s input.